


With Tongues like Flowers

by roebling



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Panic At The Disco
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-28
Updated: 2012-03-28
Packaged: 2017-11-02 15:24:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roebling/pseuds/roebling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Spencer had met Vicky-T sooner, he might have been happy in New York.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With Tongues like Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [estei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/estei/gifts).



> Notes: For estei in the Bandom BFF Fest. I fear I did no justice to Vicky-T but I hope you enjoy this. Thank you very much to octette for a top notch beta and pointing a glaring flaw to which I was blind.

Spencer meets Victoria on the day the letter comes.

She is sitting on the ground in the mail room, talking on her cell phone. Her long legs stick out, and Spencer thinks, in a mental voice that is eerily similar to his mother’s, that someone is going to trip and break a leg. There’s a huge cardboard box next to her. It blocks Spencer's mailbox. He doesn't know doesn’t know who she is. He’s never seen her in the common room or on his way to class. He's just annoyed.

"Excuse me," he says.

She doesn't notice. She doesn’t appear to, anyway.

"Excuse me," he says again. "I need to get my mail."

She rolls her eyes, and shoves her box heavily to one side. Something inside tinkles, sounding fragile.

Spencer gets out his key and opens the little door of his mailbox. He's got two credit card offers and an envelope from UNLV. He opens it with shaking hands.

_Dear Spencer,_

_It is with the heartiest of congratulations I write to offer you admission as a transfer student to the University of Nevada - Las Vegas for the upcoming fall term. Because of your outstanding academic, extracurricular, and personal qualities, we think you would be an invaluable addition to the UNLV community ..._

He closes his eyes. There's that decision made.

"Since I did you a favor,” the woman on the floor says, “you can do me one.”

Spencer's not even sure she's talking to him. He looks around, but there’s nobody else in the room.

"I don't think moving your box so I could get my mail exactly constitutes a favor." It's early, and he hasn't had coffee yet. He's a bit surly.

She laughs. "Well, maybe not. But you could do me a favor anyway. I need to carry this box up to my room, and you look like the man for the job. Broad shoulders and all."

Spencer doesn’t think that she’s flirting with him. If she is, she's sadly off the mark. Spencer's known he was gay since was twelve, and he's been out since he was a sophomore in high school. Still, it's flattering. He blushes.

"Don't you have any friends who can help you?" he asks.

The girl rolls her eyes. "I was trying to get them to get their sorry asses down here, but apparently they're camping up in Adirondack National Park this weekend. They didn't even invite me!"

"I guess I can help you," Spencer says slowly. She's a bit overwhelming, but he can carry a box. "I need to go put on real shoes first, though."

He's wearing the sweat pants and T-shirt he slept in, and flip flops. He hadn't expected his trip to the mail room to involve any actual interaction. He’s not prepared.

"Fine," she says. She looks at her watch; it’s massive and gold, dwarfing her wrist. "Be back down here as soon as you can. They keep leaving the door open and I'm getting cold."

She pulls her purple cardigan closer around herself and picks up her phone again.

Spencer takes the stairs to his quiet single room on the third floor. It's in the back of the building, looking out over a side street, and his window is shaded by some big tree. Spencer doesn't know what kind. They don't really do deciduous back home in Vegas.

He puts the letter from UNLV on his desk, digs a pair of nearly clean jeans out from his hamper, and puts on his sneakers. He'd left his door unlocked before, but some kid down the hall just had his laptop stolen, so he locks it this time. He takes the stairs again, because the elevator is slowest elevator in the history of the world. Back in the mail room, the girl hasn't moved.

"Hey," he says.

"Oh," she says, looking up. "That was fast." She stands. She's shorter than Spencer, and fine-boned. Holding out a hand, she says, "I'm Victoria."

Spencer mumbles his name.

"It's nice to meet you, Spencer," Victoria says. "Now let's move this box."

Ten minutes later, they are standing in the stairwell on the landing between the fifth and sixth floors. "Do you have lead bars in here or something?" Spencer asks, panting.

Victoria laughs. "No," she says. "It's a present from my father."

"And of course you live on the top floor," Spencer mutters.

"Only two more floors to go!" Victoria says cheerfully.

Spencer declines to point out that she's carrying the much lighter top end of the box.

Finally, they set it down in front of Victoria's door. There's a sign on the front in the shape of a star with 'Vicky-T' drawn on in rainbow letters. She takes her keys out of her bag and opens the door.

"Wow," Spencer says. "Your door is like a portal to another dimension."

Victoria laughs. "I made some improvements," she says.

Spencer takes in the big, soft carpet that covers the floor, the definitely-not-regular-issue dorm furniture, the huge gilt-frame mirror on one wall. "I can see."

They drag the box into the center of the room.

"If that's all you need ..." Spencer isn't sure if he's done doing her a favor.

She looks up from where she’s rooting in her dresser drawers and smiles. "It is," she says. "You're a lifesaver, really. What's your phone number?"

It's pathetic that it takes him a moment to remember it. He doesn’t give it out that often. She enters it into her phone as he tells her.

"Now we're friends," she says. "Spencer ... Spencer what?"

"Smith," he says.

"Well, I'm Victoria Asher, Spencer Smith," she says. “And now that we're friends, you can call me Vicky-T."

"Okay," Spencer says. "Well, um ... it was nice to meet you, Vicky-T," he says.

"You too," she says. "I'll probably see you again soon."

Spencer doesn’t believe her, but he smiles and nods anyway. He goes back down to his room. It’s quiet and dark, and most of the time he’s really glad he got a single, but sometimes he thinks he’d be happier with a roommate, even an annoying, messy one. He opens up his laptop and checks his email; he has no new messages. He reads for a while, but he’s not that interested in gift theory. He only took the class because the course description mentioned watching films, and because Ryan had talked about being an anthropology major, back when he’d been picking out his own classes that last summer they spent together, paging dreamily through the thick course booklet that Harvard sent him while Spencer stared at the ceiling and tried to think of ways to beg him not to go.

He really doesn’t care about anthropology, as it turns out.

At some point, he thinks about going down to the dining hall for lunch, but it seems like too much effort for not enough pay off: getting dressed, walking five or six blocks, waiting in the unendurable lines, trying to grab a seat … for what? A hummus wrap with wilted lettuce and browning avocado? He’ll pass.

He eats a granola bar instead.

Later, when he’s given up on his homework and is staring mindlessly at YouTube, someone knocks on his door. It’s Victoria. She smiles at him.

“Hi,” he says warily. “Do you have another box or something?”

She grins. "No. I was going to take you out to lunch. To say thanks and all."

"Isn't it a little late for lunch?"

Her eyes widen. "Well, someone's sassy." She looks down at her big garish watch again. "I guess you're right, though. Well, how about I take you out for dinner? If it's not too early for your tastes ..."

Her tone is derisive, but she's being nice. Spencer doesn't know quite what to make of that, so he just says, "No, it’s not. You totally don't have to, though."

"I want to," she says. Then she looks him up and down. "I seem to have caught you with your pants undone."

Spencer looks down. His pants are buttoned up, but the zipper is down. He cringes and does up the zipper.

"You're precious when you blush," Vicky-T says. "I'll give you half an hour to do your toilette and then I'll be back, okay?"

"Uh," Spencer says, planning on refusing -- but it's too late. She's already walking back down the hall.

He takes a quick shower and shaves and digs in his bottom drawer for his nice pair of jeans.

They go to the Chinatown Brasserie for lunch and sit in a booth that dwarfs them both. Vicky-T orders them both the dim sum prix fixe and some bright green cocktails. Spencer takes a deep sip of his when it comes. It tastes tart and herbal and surprisingly astringent, and he struggles not to grimace.

Meeting new people makes Spencer nervous, because he is always worried that he’ll have nothing to talk about with them. Spencer barely has things to talk about with his friends. His emails back to his mom have been reduced to the most perfunctory of updates: classes fine, weather cold, laundry done.

As it turns out, finding things to talk about with Victoria isn't a problem, because in absence of any other topic, she's glad to talk about herself, and there's a lot to tell.

He learns about her dog, and her famous father, and her father's career. He learns about her childhood in Los Angeles, and her famous friends (so famous he doesn’t even recognize the names she mentions). She interrupts her stories to show Spencer the proper way to eat soup dumpling. ("Bite a hole in the top, and then suck." ..."Wow, that sounds really dirty.") She interrupts again to tell Spencer that he should get his hair cut short. ("You've got such great bone structure, and you're hiding it.") Spencer isn't at all sure what time it is when they arrive at the present day, and Victoria's year-and-possibly-longer sojourn in New York after a terrible breakup.

"I do like it here," she says. Her fingernails are painted vivid red and they look sort of crazy annd mean against her green drink. "But it doesn't feel like home."

Spencer feels a little muddled. They're on their third round of those drinks; Spencer doesn’t mind the taste so much now. "Not to me either," he says. "But I didn't expect that it would."

"So why’d you come to the city, then?” she asks.

Spencer shifts uncomfortably. He feels like he's sinking into the overly plush bench seat. "I came out here for a guy," he says. "I thought ... I thought if I followed him, he'd realize that we were supposed to be together or something."

He's never told anyone that; saying it now, he realizes what a fairy-tale conceit it was all along.

"What happened?" Vicky-T asks.

"He isn't in love with me," Spencer says. "He found someone else."

"Poor Spencer," she says, and she flags the waiter for another round of drinks.

The next day, he slips back into his familiar, dull routine, a throbbing head his only reminder of the previous evening. He goes to his Great Books class and sits silently as two opinionated (and much more intelligent) classmates argue Nietzsche. He draws abstract doodles in the margins of his notebooks and thinks to himself that he never was interested in great books or lofty ideas -- that was all Ryan.

Class ends and he goes back to his quiet, dark dorm room, takes two aspirin, and sleeps for a few hours. It's just getting dark when he wakes up. He eats dinner alone in the dining hall, and then goes to the library. He sits by one of the big windows that looks out over the park and reads Virginia Woolf. He can't concentrate, though. He leaves after an hour and a half with only twenty pages read.

The next day is Friday. He doesn't have class, and he's not sure why he's awake until he realizes that someone's knocking on his door. Blearily, he staggers across the room and unlocks it.

"Uhmm?" he asks, blinking.

"Good morning," Victoria says. She's dressed and made-up and wide awake. "Are you still sleeping? Dude, it's nine o'clock. Your entire day is going to waste."

Spencer swallows. "Uhhh," he says. "I was just getting up?"

"I think you might be lying to me, Spencer," she says. "I was going to ask you if you wanted to come to brunch." She glances at her phone. "I called Nate, but he's busy or something." She makes a face.

Spencer frowns. She paid for lunch the other day, and he gathered from that adventure that her tastes are not cheap. He can't afford to take her to brunch at the kind of place he imagines she's in the habit of going.

“If we go get bagels,” he says, “I’ll pay.”

She smiles. “It’s a deal, Smith.”

She waits in his room while he changes. He’s too tired to remember to be self-conscious, at least, until she says, "You're pretty cute, Smith. I should find you a hot Brazilian guy to rebound with."

Spencer blushes. "Thanks," he says. "But no thanks."

Victoria laughs.

It's a misty spring morning. People are walking down the streets still wrapped in their winter coats. Spencer's wearing his, too, with a scarf his grandmother knit wound around his neck. He doesn't think he'll ever get used to this chill. He has desert bones.

Los Angeles childhood aside, the weather doesn't seem to have the same effect on Victoria. She's wearing a bright pink skirt and extremely high heels. Spencer keeps thinking she's going to fall -- how could she not fall, wearing those? -- but she only wobbles once or twice and never falls.

They get cheap coffee and bagels at the place by school -- sesame with plain cream cheese for Spencer, plain with scallion cream cheese for Victoria -- and they take them to Union Square and sit on the damp benches to eat their breakfast.

"Sorry," Spencer says. "This probably isn't as exciting as what you had planned.

Victoria sucks her thumb into her mouth. The cream cheese has melted, and the bagels are messy to eat. "Exciting can be overrated," she says.

When they're done, they wander around the farmer's market for a while. It's pretty early in the season, but the bakers are selling their multi-grain honey cranberry loaves and the beekeepers are selling organic clover honey.

Victoria takes Spencer's arm through hers. It's kind of awkward, for him.

"When I grow up, I want to have a big apartment somewhere near a farmer's market," she says. "I'm going to have a twee as fuck wicker basket and go to the market every day and get, like, rhubarb and watercress and some of these funky cheeses. I’ll go home and cook huge, elaborate meals and all of my friends will come."

"Sounds awesome," Spencer says, and he thinks it does, especially the ‘cooking for friends’ part.

Victoria purses her lips. "I don't really want to do that, you know," she says. "I want to be a rock star. Or a model. Or maybe I'll move to Japan and become one of those pop idols. I went there once with my dad."

She doesn’t say anything else about her trip.

"The apartment by the farmer's market can be your secret retreat," Spencer says. "For when you can't handle the pressure of your fame."

Victoria smiles. "Exactly."

Over the course of the next several weeks, Spencer goes to the MOMA with Victoria, wearing a vintage suit she gives him that fits very well, but makes him feel very awkward. (When he fiddles with the buttons on his cuffs, she bats his hands away and tells him to stop fussing.) They go to a hookah bar and smoke mint tobacco and drink strange beer. They go to see Nickelback at Madison Square Garden, and because Victoria's father is who he is they get to go backstage (although neither of them want to). They stand in the big empty halls under the arena, whispering to each other and laughing.

Spencer still manages to go to class. He still spends a few hours a week at the library studying, although now Victoria comes with him, and sitting at the opposite desk she paints her toenails, drawing outraged stares from the proctors. (They're powerless to do anything. They've deliberately sat in a remote and unloved corner of the library far from anyone else, and she doesn't have any library materials, so she's not actually doing anything wrong. She delights in exploiting this loophole.)

Victoria is a student, too -- she'd have to be to live in the dorms. When Spencer asks her about her classes, she just shrugs and says, "I'm doing some independent studies this semester."

The one class she does attend is a survey of film on Thursday evenings. She makes Spencer come with her and they sit in the very back and drowse while watching _A Man and a Woman_.

When they get out, Victoria says, "I know it's a classic, but, god, are they dense or something?"

Spencer shrugs. He thinks the movie seems like something that Ryan would have loved. He doesn’t get it, himself.

"I guess I'm just crass," she says.

"I'm just a simpleton," Spencer says. "It's probably better to be crass."

Victoria laughs and laughs. Spencer knew she would.

"That's why I like you," she says. "No pretensions. Let's go back to your dorm and watch _Clueless_."

He tells her about Ryan -- the whole story, not the vagaries he's fed her so far -- on a cold morning in March when they go to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Spencer's rarely been so far into Brooklyn, even though he's lived here for six months. They get there early enough that the park is empty. In the main plaza, the magnolias are in absurd blossom.

"We don't have trees like this in Las Vegas," he says. "That's why my friend -- Ryan -- that's why he wanted to leave. He said that Las Vegas trees were all wrong."

Victoria rolls her eyes. "Oh boy," she says. "He sounds like a fun one. He must have written a lot of bad poetry."

Spencer's cheeks grow warm. Defensiveness on Ryan's behalf is an involuntary reaction.

"We were in a band," he mutters. "He was the lyricist."

Victoria's eyes light up. "You have to let me listen to some of your stuff," she says.

Spencer shrugs. "We don't have any. Recorded, I mean." They'd talked about it and talked about it, especially after Brendon joined and they realized he could _sing_ , but they didn't have the money or the time and then -- then it hadn't mattered anyway.

"We always meant to," he tells Victoria, but he's speaking more to himself. "Ryan wanted to send our songs to Pete Wentz or something." He hadn't thought that funny at the time, but he's been in New York long enough to know that he's got to play that line with self-deprecating irony. "But then Ryan got into Harvard." Spencer shrugs.

"And he just left?" Victoria says, nose wrinkled in displeasure. "Left the band for Harvard? You're better off."

"I think anyone would have left the band for Harvard," Spencer says, still not able to quell that vein of defensiveness. "And anyway, he was the band. After he left, we just ... stopped."

"Well, you shouldn't have," she says. "You could have carried on without him." She sounds certain they could have, although she doesn’t know anything about any of it.

Spencer tucks his hands into his coat pockets. It's a little chilly. When he woke up, he thought the sun might dispel the mist as it rose -- but it hasn't. It's grey and cool and he's under-dressed. Victoria is too -- she's wearing a black fur coat ("Faux fur," she'd reassured him on the walk to the subway), but underneath she's only got on a short black dress and see-through stockings. She wraps her arms around herself, and her lips are nearly purple, but she doesn’t complain.

"I came out here for him," Spencer says. They're standing at the lily pool, watching the water. All the lilies are clipped back for the winter; there's nothing to see.

Victoria raises her eyebrows. "I hate to break it to you," she says, "but you're in the wrong city."

Spencer closes his eyes and laughs. "I do know where Harvard is," he says, sarcastic. Then, somber: "He didn't come home last summer, stayed to work and take classes. I thought if I came out east, if I got into a good school, he'd ..."

His throat is tight. He swallows.

"He's the one who you loved."

"Yes," Spencer says. "We ... we were best friends for our whole lives, and when we were in high school." He shrugs. "He said he wasn't sure if he was gay. He was curious. I mean … he really was."

"What happened?" Victoria crouches down. She picks up a pebble and throws it into the water. The ripples travel out.

"I went and visited him the second weekend I was here," Spencer says. That weekend rates up there at the top of the list of things he’d rather forget. "I had emailed him, told him how much I missed him, how much I was looking forward to seeing him." He frowns. "I should have known better, but I wrote him a letter telling him how I felt. He was always much better with words."

"Let me guess," Victoria says. "He was fucking around with some Boston Brahmin with red hair and too many Hermès scarves. They're going to move to Paris after graduation."

Spencer giggles, giddy with relief at having finally -- finally -- told someone. "That actually sounds like Ryan. But, uh. No. It wasn't that." He closes his eyes, because this is the part that had hurt the most. He knows Ryan hadn't meant it -- he knows Ryan shuts down when the emotional stakes are high -- he knows that, but his heart still aches.

"He read my letter," Spencer says. "I was asleep and I woke up and he was at his desk reading it, and he just turned to me and said, 'I'm sorry, Spence. I'm not gay.'"

"What an ass!" Victoria says, voice high. "Wow, dude, that sucks."

Spencer nods. "Yeah, it really did." He pauses. "Her name was Elizabeth, by the way. They're writing music together."

"Oh, no way," Victoria says. "This totally means we have to find you some super hot indie rock boy to hook up with just so you can rub it in his face."

Spencer shakes his head. "I don't want to do that," he says. "I mean, I'm kind of pissed at him, but I'm more pissed at myself. I came all the way out here just because I thought it would impress him. That's pretty fucking stupid, right?"

Victoria shrugs. "A little," she agrees. "But look on the bright side. If you hadn't come out here, you wouldn't have met me."

He smiles at her, and she smiles back, and he thinks that worse things have happened to him.

They walk through the gardens for a while. The cherry trees aren’t blooming yet; their bark is glossy silver in the damp. Victoria stops under them. “We should come back when they’re blooming,” she says. “I’ve always liked cherry blossoms.”

“Oh yeah?” Spencer says, hands in his pockets.

“Yes,” she says. “I was in D.C. one year when they were blooming, with … with a friend. The trees looked like they were covered in pink frosting. We sat on a blanket and drank gin. There were tons of cops with like, heavy duty rifles and stuff and we kept thinking they were going to see us drinking and haul us away.”

“That sounds really fun,” Spencer says. “A little scary, but fun.”

“It was,” she says. “But the stupid flowers kept getting stuck in my hair. I was picking them out for a week.”

“Maybe if we come back your friend can come too,” he says.

She kicks at the ground, getting her shoes all dirty. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time,” she says. “I guess … I guess it was one of those things where we were friends and stuff and then I went back to LA and we just stopped being friends.”

Spencer takes a deep breath. “Do you think it works like that?” he asks her. “Like, don’t you think there was a reason you were friends in the first place? Some connection or reason or something?”

She shrugs. “I guess,” she says. Then: “No, not really. People hang out with whoever is around. Then they go away and meet other people and forget about you.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Spencer says.

“Think what you want, Smith,” she says, and she pulls her shabby fur coat closer.

They leave the park and walk over to 4th Avenue and eat lunch in a cramped restaurant with outrageous prices. Spencer can't imagine that any food is worth that much money, but then he gets home-made fettuccine with black truffle butter and he realizes that he was so wrong.

"That was literally the best thing I've ever eaten," he says. "I'm not going to be able to walk home."

Victoria rolls her eyes. "We can just take a cab," she says.

Spencer bites his lips. He's been here for six months and -- he hasn't yet. He doesn't stray too far from school, and even on the rare occasions he does, he doesn't have the money to take a cab back. "I haven't been in one," he admits. "I'm afraid they're going to kidnap me or something."

Victoria gasps, mock-annoyed. "We're going to have to do something about that," she says.

Later, when they're flying across the Manhattan Bridge (well, flying as fast as one can fly in solid traffic) Victoria wraps her arm around his shoulder and pulls him close and snaps a picture of the two of them on her phone, the gorgeous, surreal skyline in the background.

"There," she says, fiddling. "Now everyone on Facebook can be jealous of our marvelous afternoon."

"Good," Spencer says. "They ought to be."

"Exactly," she says, laughing.

And later still, when he's standing in the corner while Victoria haggles with a florist because she thinks she should get a discount if she buys six dozen stems of ranunculus, Spencer thinks, _If I met her earlier, I might have wanted to stay._

He emails Brendon that night. It's a brief email. He didn't have much time to be Brendon's friend back in high school, but he'd liked him straight away, and he always feels guilty at how infrequently he responds to the messages Brendon sends him on Facebook. Brendon is still in Vegas, still working at the Smoothie Hut, still engaged in a war of attrition with his parents that will end the day he has enough money saved up to move out. He's fumbling through a part-time course load at UNLV, if his many status updates about "freaking statistics" and "reading the origin of the spe .... zzzzzzz" are any indication.

Spencer's email is short, but to the point.

_How's it going, dude? Same old, same old out here. I actually applied to transfer to UNLV for the fall ... and guess what? I got in. Not sure if I'm going to do it yet, but I think I might. New York's too expensive. Anyway, I have until June to let them know, so I have some time to think about it. Gotta go study. Talk to you soon man._

He presses send and then shuts his laptop and goes and walks around the block a few times. It's ten o'clock, but the streets are still busy with people going and coming. Spencer doesn't have a fake ID, but that's never presented a problem here. He hasn't been carded once, despite a nagging fear he looks like he's sixteen.

It's not like him at all, but he goes to the noisy, awful frat boy bar down the street and orders a beer. He sits at the bar drinking it, waiting for someone to talk to him. When he finishes his first beer, he gets a second. When he's finished the second, he leaves.

Nobody talked to him. He doesn't know why he thought they would.

Midterms rear their ugly head, and even though he might be transferring, Spencer doesn't want to just give up on his classes. He goes to the library every day and reads his notes and writes his papers and actually studies. He even goes to the student-run writing lab one day, because Spencer's always had an inferiority complex about his papers. (It comes from having Ryan proofread them for all those years.)

He doesn't see Victoria that week. She doesn't call, or text, or show up at his door with a bunch of balloons for no reason or anything. He stops by her dorm one evening on his way home, and although he can see the line of light under the door, she doesn't answer when he knocks.

He texts her the next day. _Did they have a fire sale on flights to Rio or something? Where are you?_

She doesn't reply, but shows up at his room the next night with two bottles of champagne and a tin of peach juice tucked into her enormous miumiu tote. (Spencer knows it's that brand because she told him specifically how much she'd wanted this bag, how delighted she'd been when her father got it for her for Christmas. For something that she wanted so badly, she’s careless with it, throwing it thoughtlessly in the corner, using it to carry groceries.)

She's gone very heavy on the eye makeup, and her skin is pale. "Dudes suck," she says. "And New York sucks." She looks him up and down. "Cute Snoopy pajamas, Smith."

Spencer flushes. He'd forgotten what he was wearing.

"I was going to invite you up to binge on bellinis with me," she says, "but Snoopy would kill the mood."

"Let me change," he says.

She watches him while he does. He's gotten kind of used to that.

Upstairs in her room, the ranunculus are gone, replaced with ruffled purple tulips. They're in vases all over her dresser and her desk, on top of her mini-fridge and on the floor.

"Did you go to Holland? Is that where you were?"

She rolls her eyes. "I ordered them at the florist down the street," she says. "One gross parrot tulips. They do give you a discount for twelve-fucking-dozen flowers, it turns out."

He nods. She stands at her desk and uncorks the champagne. She pours a very generous amount into each of two neon pink solo cups.

"I had glassware but I smashed it." She doesn't sound apologetic.

Spencer's surprised that she hasn't smashed all the vases, to be honest.

"Be a pal and open that can," she says nodding at the peach juice. "I can't fucking work those Swiss army knife bullshit can openers."

Spencer can. He learned the year he was in scouts. He'd only joined because Ryan had, attracted by the sharp uniform and many colorful badges. When Ryan had lost interest, Spencer'd quit too, although not without having gained certain essential survival skills.

He hands her the open can, and she pours a dollop of peach juice into each cup. "Not quite the way they serve them in Venice," she says, taking a sip, "but they'll do the trick."

They sit on her floor, listening to late nineties R&B. Spencer knows most of the lyrics, but doesn't sing along. Vicky-T just drinks mostly, with a concentrated rapidness that's a little worrying. When she's finished her first drink, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, "People suck. Men suck. Friends suck." She looks at him through half-closed lashes. "You're the exception, of course, Smith."

"Thanks," he says. He sips his own drink. It really is good -- fruity and light, like the ginger ale and sherbet punch his mom used to serve at birthday parties.

She stands up, wobbly in bare feet like he's never seen her in her precipitous heels. "My friends are all dicks -- not you, Smith. The rest of my friends are all dicks. They're going off and meeting Gabe Saporta and joining his band without me."

"Gabe Saporta ..." That name is familiar. "The guy from Midtown?"

She nods. Her hair falls around her face. "My friends Alex and Ryland. I used to do merch for their band for free and everything. We were going to start making our own remixes and be the next Mis-shapes, but now they're going to be _famous_ and I'm just going to be the dumb rich girl who stalked them online back in the day."

Spencer grimaces. Her eye makeup is smearing. "You could just make your own remixes," he says.

She looks up. "I don't even know how to use Garage Band," she says sadly.

Spencer thinks he's going to regret this, but he says, "I sort of know. I mean, I taught myself a little bit. I could show you."

Victoria's eyes light up.

They record a very original cover of Fiona Apple's "Criminal" in three takes. Victoria keeps a keyboard in the corner of her room. Spencer had -- unfairly, he knows -- thought it might be only decoration, but she plays very well. He improvises a shaker for percussion with a coffee can full of buttons.

"We're going to be stars," she says sleepily when they're finished. It's four in the morning and Spencer is frankly shocked the RA hasn't come down to tell them to be quiet.

"You're already a star," Spencer says, embarrassed immediately that he's said something so mawkish and blatantly sentimental.

She smiles at him. "You're a very nice person, Spencer."

They fall asleep on her bed, fully clothed.

Spencer wakes in the morning before she does. He has a class. He nearly knocks over some of the tulips scrounging on her desk for paper to leave a note.

 _Had to go be a scholar_ , he writes. _If you have a record deal before I get back, don't forget about me._

He doesn't go back to his room. He gets a cup of coffee from the terrible coffee place on the corner and slouches into the lecture hall completely unprepared. Positioning himself strategically behind a column, he rests his hand on his elbow and spends class sipping bitter coffee and staring out the window at the way the spring sky gets brighter and bright and bright as the morning wears on.

After class, he goes to his room and takes a shower and then a nap. He checks his phone, but he doesn't have any messages. He wouldn't, except from his mother or Victoria, and he hopes for her sake she's still asleep.

Victoria disappears again until the weekend. For once, Spencer is awake when she shows up at his door.

Her hair is shiny and her makeup freshly done, but there's something in the rigid tense way her fingers grip the door jamb that makes Spencer think she hasn't slept.

"I went home," she says abruptly. "I missed my parents, and I called my dad and told him I wanted a ticket, and I went home for a few days." She tosses her head. "You probably think I'm a coward, running away like that."

Spencer shakes his head. He doesn't at all. He knows the feeling very well.

"I know they do," she says. "I know people think I'm just some spoiled fucking rich girl who's never going to have to do anything other than buy nice clothes and look pretty."

"I don't think people think that," Spencer says.

"They do," Victoria says. "I _know_ they do, because if I knew me, that's what I'd think, too."

He thinks she's being unfair to herself. She's never treated him like the dumb, boring, suburban nobody he worries he is. He wants to tell her that, but then decides to change tactics.

"Did you sleep on the flight?" he asks, even though the answer is obvious.

She shakes her head. "Nope," she says. "And I went right to the airport from a party. Awful, right?"

Spencer shrugs. He's only flown a very few times: once to visit his father's brother in Indiana, and then to come out here. He doesn't know enough about air travel to have an opinion.

"Did you show anyone our song?" he asks, hoping that subject is less sore.

"Everyone was very impressed," she says. "But fuck them. I've been taking piano lessons since I could walk. It would be pretty sad if I couldn't play."

"I've never heard you play, though," he says, confused. "I mean, before that."

She shrugs. "Guess it seems kind of dumb just to do it for no reason."

"Doing it because you like it is a reason," he says. "I don't think you need another reason.

He thinks she always needs another reason. One as simple as that wouldn't be enough.

She stares at him.

"Do you want to watch a movie?"

She nods. "Whatever," she says.

They sit on his bed with his laptop balanced between them and watch _High School Musical_. Her feet hang off the edge.

"I'm not going to ask why you have this on DVD," she says.

"My sisters ..." he protests weakly.

Truthfully, he has a big crush on Zac Efron.

She seems to like it, though.

"I wish real life was like this," she says. "Like, I wish everyone were as predictable as these assholes." She tips her head back. "If you were in this movie, you'd totally be the quiet kid in the corner who ends up writing the hilarious gossip column in the school newspaper."

Spencer narrows his eyes, but he smiles. "Uh, thanks, I think?"

"I meant it as a compliment," she says, elbowing him. "I would be Sharpei, obviously."

He isn't sure if she wants him to disagree; the comparison is kind of apt.

"She _is_ the most fabulous," he says after a while.

Victoria giggles. "Damn right," she says. She rests her head on his shoulder and they watch Zac Efron play musical basketball.

When the credits are rolling, Victoria says, "We should start a band, Smith. Me and you. We could take this city by storm. We'd be playing Terminal 5 before next year."

Spencer frowns. "I have to go home for the summer," he says.

He can't see it, but he knows she rolls his eyes. "Well we can write all summer then. Via Skype. We can write and work on our image and come back as the like, inverse version of the White Stripes, but more electronic. The Black Dots."

She laughs at her own cleverness, but Spencer's heart is cold. He hasn't told her, because he's not absolutely sure himself, but he really is. He knows how alone and miserable he's been here, and he knows how expensive it is. His parents had sighed and exchanged wary glances when he told them that yes, he was positive New York was the right place.

He hadn't even been sure, just sick in love with Ryan and scared of losing him and desperate for anything that would bring them closer.

"I ... I might not come back next year," he says.

She pulls away. "What?"

"I might have to transfer back to the school in Vegas," he says slowly. Then, because he's sick of making decisions based on what he thinks other people want, he adds, "I mean, I applied and got in and ... I want to, I guess."

She slides off the bed. Her cheeks are red and there's red across the bridge of her nose and her hair is mussed. She looks younger than usual, but her eyes are dull. "Oh," she says. "Well, yeah. I can see why you'd be desperate to go back to suburban Las Vegas. All those golf courses and strip malls … electrifying stuff."

"Vicky-T..."

"It's cool, Smith," she says, barely shrugging. "I get it. You're a busy dude, didn't have time to mention your plans to me. It's fine. I totally get it." She smiles. "I'm _used to it_ ," she says, and she must mean it to sound vicious but her voice cracks and her eyes are watery and she turns and goes, letting his door slam in her wake.

"Fuck," Spencer whispers. He hadn't meant to keep it from her -- not because he didn't care. He kept it from her because she is smart and brilliantly bright and so full of life (like Ryan, he thinks) and he had known that if he told her he was giving up and packing it in and running back to Vegas with his tail between his legs, she would have judged him. Whether she tried to pretend otherwise or not, she would have judged him.

Or so he thought.

He checks his email while he thinks about going after her. There's one from Brendon.

_DONT DO IT SPENCE!!! Dont get sucked back in!! Seriously dude it would be awsum to hang out again but Vegas is the worst :( Maybe I should come out there to NY?? J/K Anyway, if you do come back, we gotta jam sometime. I'm in a musical drought. Too many shifts on the blender at Smoothie Hut. I hear it in my sleep. :(_

_Write when you know what you're doing!  
Brendon_

He takes that as a bad sign.

He makes the obligatory trek upstairs to check on Vicky-T. Her door is shut, but he can hear music. He knocks, waits, knocks again.

She never answers. He hadn't expected her to.

The next few weeks drag on, a drudgery of unseasonably nice weather. All the flowers are blooming. People lay on the green lawns in the park in less clothing than they should. Spencer goes to class. He goes to the library sometimes. He eats his meals in the dining hall. He forces himself to do things on the weekend -- things he hasn't done yet, things he might never get the chance to do again. He goes to the Bronx Zoo, taking a city bus for the first time, driving past neighborhoods so vastly different from each other that it's hard to believe they're part of the same city.

In Vegas, the city sprawls lazily over a huge spread of desert, but everything looks the same.

So he goes to the Bronx Zoo and Coney Island and to a Mets game with a discount student ticket he gets through school. He wanders around Central Park and the Upper East Side, walking more than he's ever walked in his entire life.

With Victoria gone -- well, not gone, but as good as -- he doesn't have a lot of people to talk to. It hadn't bothered him as much before, but now he feels like he's got all these things to say and nobody to say them to. He walks and studies and when he just can't keep things to himself he emails Brendon. Spencer never worries that Brendon's secretly judging him or whatever.

Brendon gives him some pretty good advice, too.

 _Sucks yr friend got mad. But maybe she's just scared to lose you?_ he writes. _Really sucks when yr friends move away._

He doesn't say much more, and underneath the pang of guilt Spencer thinks, oh. For all that Victoria talks about her parties and her boys and her friends and her vacations and all the glamorous trappings of her life, Spencer's never actually met any of them. He's never seen any of it. And he thinks that maybe people need to pretend sometimes -- not to fool other people, but to fool themselves.

He tries to find her to apologize, to say he didn't realize. He sits for hours in the lobby, pretending like he's studying, but really watching for her coming and going. He goes up to her room twice a day. Sometimes she's in -- deep thudding bass making the cheap walls shake -- and sometimes she's not, but she never comes to the door.

In the end, he tries an old trick. He writes her a letter. There's a chance -- a good chance, even -- that this letter will net results as poor as the letter he wrote to Ryan. But there's a chance it might turn out better. After all, Spencer's at fault this time, and even if Vicky-T doesn't ever want to talk to him again, he wants to apologize. He wants to her to know that she's been his best friend these last couple of months. He wants her to know that he doesn't know how he could have gotten through them without her.

He writes her a letter on a too-expensive card he buys from a fancy gift shop. There are two Victorian ladies on the front in crazy Victorian-era corsets and frilly long underpants. Their hands bracket their ridiculously tiny waists, and their faces are twisted in grimaces. 

It's a weird card, but it makes him think of her, somehow.

His message is brief and plain-sounding. He's never had Ryan's way with words.

_I came out here to win someone over who didn't want me like I wanted him. I've never been very good at making friends. You're the first friend I've made this whole year, Vicky-T. You're funny and smart and confident and you've done all these things I can't even imagine doing. I didn't tell you I was leaving because I didn’t think you’d miss me. That was selfish of me. I'm sorry._

At the bottom he puts his email address and his phone number (in case she's deleted them) and he tells her when his flight is and says he'd like to see her before he goes.

He leaves the letter in her mailbox and hopes that she's still picking up her mail.

She doesn't call or email or anything, but he still feels a little better.

Finals are upon him, then, and for someone who didn't do very much, or meet many people, there are still a lot of loose ends to tie up. He has books to take back to the library and a locker in the humanities building to empty out and a heavy winter coat he'll never need in Vegas to sell or donate.

He's looking forward to going home, but he thinks he'll miss New York more than he expected to.

He's in the library one evening, struggling to stretch his final paper for Western Civ to twenty-five pages when, during a Facebook break, he sees that Ryan's posted a picture of himself and his girlfriend. They're sitting on a grassy lawn, their backs against a brick wall, each holding a book that obscures the lower half of their face. They're looking at each other, and the sunshine makes his girlfriend's hair look almost silver.

 _You're like a hipster postcard_ Spencer comments. _Just kidding. Hope everything's good, Ry._

He gets nervous after that and has to log out of Facebook, which is actually a good thing for his paper, but as he's walking home later, he thinks that he doesn't really wish Ryan ill. He's just a little jealous, maybe -- but he's always been a little jealous of Ryan, and maybe that's never been fair.

The night before his flight, he stays up later than he should, thinking maybe she'll come down at last. It's weird -- Victoria Jane Asher is the least likely person for him to be friends with. They don't even have anything in common. But he misses her badly -- misses her feigned preposterous posturing and her improbable shoes and her wit and her generosity of spirit. That phrase came up somewhere in his week-long caffeine-fueled finals reading binge, but it describes her perfectly.

She doesn't come down, or call, or email, and at one o'clock in the morning, he goes to bed in his dorm room for the last time.

He is woken not by the alarm on his cell phone but by someone pounding on the door. Rolling over, he thinks that it's too early for Victoria want to go out -- but then he remembers he hasn't spoken to her in three weeks. He half-falls out of bed and staggers over to the door.

"'lo?" he mumbles.

"There's a car coming in an hour," Victoria says. "If you're abandoning New York, Smith, you have to abandon it in style."

She smiles. There's a little of her bright red lipstick on her front tooth, but Spencer doesn't point that out.

"Hey," he says. "Um. You didn't have to do that."

Victoria waves away his concern. "I wanted to," she says. Her sunglasses, propped on top of her head, are sliding down. She pushes them back up. "I told my dad I had a friend who needed a ride. He insisted."

"You're the best," he says.

She grins. "I know."

She leaves him to shower. When he's done, he tosses his toiletries in a garbage bag with his infrequently washed dorm sheets. He feels bad about throwing them away, but he won't need them anymore, and he can't fit them in his suitcase -- he can barely get it zipped as it is.

At ten Victoria comes back downstairs. "Your chariot awaits," she says.

Spencer grabs his suitcase and his duffel bag. The room is empty and anonymous again, as empty as it was the day he moved in. He hopes that the next person who lives here leaves more of a mark on it.

He gives his key to the girl at the hall office, and signs a few papers, and that's it. He's done. He walks outside, blinking in the bright sunshine.

Victoria is standing on the sidewalk in front of a big black sedan with tinted windows.

"So this is how the rich and fabulous travel." Spencer had been planning to take the subway.

Victoria raises her eyebrows. "You know it."

The driver is named Steve. He tips his cap at Spencer and takes his luggage, which is kind of weird. Spencer slides into the wide back seat, hands brushing the soft, cool leather. There's a bottle of champagne and a bowl of fruit.

"Geeze," Spencer says. "Seriously, Victoria ..."

"Don't say a word," she says. "I told you, if you're abandoning the greatest place on earth, you've gotta do it the right way."

She opens the bottle of champagne and they drink it from plastic flutes and Victoria tells some long story about a party she went to where another woman wore the same dress that she was wearing.

"I cut off the sleeves," she says. "I totally worked it."

It's almost the same as before, but it's not, because Spencer is going home today, and he's not coming back.

"I think my friend Brendon and I are going to get our band back together," he says as Victoria pours herself another drink.

"Awesome," she says. "You better send me all your songs the instant they're written."

"They're not going to be very good," he says. "I mean, not at first."

She shakes her head. "Smith, haven't you learned anything from me? You're supposed to say, 'Of course I will. They're all going to be chart-toppers. Every one.'"

"Oh, yeah?" he says, laughing.

"Yeah," she says.

There's not a huge amount of traffic. They make it to JFK before the bottle's even empty. As they're pulling off the highway, Victoria says, "Let's chug it."

She hands him the bottle. He upends it and swallows, and passes her the rest. She drinks it down and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. She smiles at him. He smiles back.

They pull up to the curb outside of the terminal. Steve opens the door for them, and gets Spencer's bag.

"Well, Smith," Victoria says, hands on her hips.

This might be the last time that he sees her, and that gives him the courage to act a little maudlin. "Come here," he says, and he hugs her. She's shorter than he is, even in her heels. "My life is going to be five hundred percent more boring without you."

"You don't give yourself enough credit," she says.

"I'm not going to forget you," he says, and that terrible cold fear of separation wells up in his stomach. “I’ll never forget you, Vicky-T.”

She steps back. "Don't be so dramatic, Smith. I'll come out to Vegas sometime soon, get a room in the Bellagio. We can get buzzed and play the penny slots."

"You promise?" he asks.

"I promise," she says. Then, hesitantly, she adds. “I won’t forget you either.” She smiles. "Who knows, this time next year, you and your friend could be the next big thing and I could be releasing my first single on Interscope. Maybe I'll catch you at the Grammys."

He laughs. "Maybe," he says.

The driver eyes them, antsy.

"I better go before someone tries to forcibly ram the car out of the way for the spot."

He watches her for a minute, then says, "Don't forget about me either, okay?"

She gives him one last brilliant grin and says, "Come on, Smith. I never could."

She waves one more time, and gets in the car. The driver shuts the door, and gets in himself, and pulls away. In a moment, the car is indistinguishable in the stream of traffic, and then it is out of sight.

Spencer wheels his suitcase into the bright, empty terminal. He's going to miss her, and he's going to miss this crazy, awful city, but it doesn't feel like a retreat. He's going back to Vegas, but he's not leaving her behind.


End file.
